Debian Needs a Significant Change of Direction and Recognition of Cumulative Errors Made
Aggregation of cover-up only worsens things (like a chain of lies to cover up an "original lie")
JUDGING by last week's rather tactless publication, nothing will change for the better under Andreas Tille. They just attack the messenger without ever answering the message. That messenger had contributed to Debian since the 1990s. He's not a troll and not a "concern troll" either. He's a Debian Developer with legitimate concerns, but Chris, Sam, Jon, and Andreas don't want to hear about it. Instead they try to protect one another from any morsel of scrutiny. This is kingdom- or monarchy-building, it cannot result in healthy communities of a participatory nature and it merely alienates "tenants" of the kingdom. Things have gotten so bad that Debian lets Microsoft employees vote and vandalise Debian, whereas long-time contributors get shunned for raising ethical concerns or protecting colleagues from injustice.
One associate of ours has commented about Daniel Pocock today. Debian as a "project" (monarchy) should think carefully what its future is; it can issue "STATEMENT ON DANIEL POCOCK" every 24 hours if it wishes to, only to realise it has no good effect and ordinary Debian Developers merely get curious about what Pocock has to say. They may in turn check what he writes and it doesn't serve the interest of the censors.
If Debian leadership genuinely cares about women, then it'll start actually listening to them. Yes, like Pocock did...
"He is doing good work," our associate said, "but it is terrible that the Debian project has gotten taken over by Microsofters and other bullshitters. I'd rather the Debian project use its effort to clean itself up and get back to technical matters like 25 years ago."
"The world is in an unfortunate position in that some 400 distros trace back to Debian and only a few are even conscious of the danger. The corruption must be very common. It's too bad that LO, Debian, etc allowed it to take hold."
My wife and I (both ardent Debian users) talked about it today as we compared it to EPO corruption. Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos commit crimes and cover up for each other. They also hand-pick friends as deputies, i.e. they prefer loyalists rather than people qualified for the job. It's a patent office that has no oversight, where people protect successors and predecessors, amplifying the corruption and then paying firms to fake workers' sentiments. The corruption can only deepen over time (adding more and more layers to the cover-up) and no goodwill can salvage the institution. No amount of PR cannot redeem the organisation when it's rotten to the core and all the talented people have left already. They won't be coming back.
Debian, please heed the warning of EPO workers. █
Photo credit: Aigars Mahinovs, CC BY 2.0; Attribution 2.0 Generic; Deed